The U.S. adds 196,000 jobs, beats expectations

The U.S. added a cool 196,000 jobs in March.
Wall Street economists were expecting the U.S. economy to have added 175,000 non-farm payrolls in March, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
February’s sharply lower-than-expected 20,000 job additions were revised 33,000.
The unemployment rate 3.8%, the same pace of increase as in February, according to consensus economists polled by Bloomberg.
The labor force participation rate 63.0%. On average, economists were expecting to see the labor force participation rate remain unchanged, at a five-and-a-half year high of 63.2%.
Average hourly earnings grew 3.2% year-over-year, below estimates for 3.4% growth. Month-over-month, average hourly earnings grew 0.1%, below the 0.4% increase seen in February.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.
“Really it looks like an anomaly,” Joshua Wright, chief economist for iCIMS, said in an interview with Yahoo Finance about February’s reading. His firm’s model estimates that the economy added 160,000 non-farm payrolls in March.
The fluctuations in the headline payrolls figures over the past several months lend additional weight to March’s results, as market participants seek an emerging trend to help smooth out the volatility.
Nevertheless, the current three-month trend in non-farm payroll additions stands at a still-healthy 186,000. That’s thanks to much higher job creation in January and December.
“One of the things that’s been most remarkable over the last 10 years has been just how steady the labor market expansion has been,” Wright said. Following February’s results, the U.S. economy added new jobs for its 101st consecutive month.
“Normally when you have an expansion go on this long, job growth dips into negative territory every now and then,” he said.
Many economists noted that exogenous factors – including weather effects from a colder-than-average February and lingering impact from the beginning of the year’s protracted partial government shutdown – likely played a role in influencing the past several jobs reports.
Marvin Loh, global macro strategist at State Street, noted that the March jobs report will be “the first clean one in a while” as residual impact from the government shutdown wanes.
“Hopefully we’ll get something that we can dissect a little bit more accurately than the last couple of months,” Loh said in an interview with Yahoo Finance.
Consensus economists expect the U.S. economy to have added 175,000 non-farm payrolls in March, according to Bloomberg-compiled data.
Friday’s jobs report follows ADP/Moody’s results on private payrolls, which were released earlier this week. That data revealed a gain of 129,000 new positions in March. This came in below estimates of 175,000 — although February’s reading was upwardly revised by 14,000 to 197,000.
While many economists point out that ADP/Moody’s report has historically been an imperfect indicator of the BLS’s results, others acknowledge that it helps counterbalance noise in the “official” establishment survey.
“The upward revision to ADP’s February estimate suggest that ADP’s data show a notably different pattern relative to the numbers from the BLS and that ADP expects February’s BLS numbers to be revised up on Friday,” Nomura economist Lewis Alexander wrote in a note.
“In that sense, it is possible that the BLS March employment report will show a weaker-than-expected March employment gain but with strong upward revisions to February,” he added.

This story is developing. Please check back for updates.

Heidi Chung
Reporter

 The U.S. adds 196,000 jobs, beats expectations

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IMF Executive Board Discusses the First Assessment of Eligible Countries under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative

On December 21, 2005 the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) established the list of countries that qualify for debt relief from the Fund under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI). Debt relief delivery, which could start as soon as January 3, 2005, is now conditional on getting the consents of all the contributors to the Subsidy Account of the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) Trust, whose contributions help finance the Initiative. The MDRI will deliver debt relief from the Fund to qualifying members countries with an annual per capita income at or below US$380, and to countries above the threshold that have reached the completion point under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. The implementation of the MDRI will reduce the external debt burden of a number of the world's poorest countries and will provide additional resources to help them reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Background The Executive Board appro...
Read more

Oil’s chaotic collapse deepens; stocks drop worldwide

Image
NEW YORK (AP) — Oil prices crumpled even further Tuesday, and U.S. stocks sank to their worst loss in weeks as worries swept markets worldwide about the economic carnage caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The market’s spotlight was again on oil, where prices have plummeted because very few people are flying or driving, and factories have shut amid widespread stay-at-home orders. Global demand is set to drop to levels last seen in the mid 1990s. At the same time, oil producers can’t slow their production fast enough, and all the extra crude means storage tanks are quickly running out of room. The cost for a barrel of U.S. oil to be delivered in June plunged 43% to $11.57. That’s the part of the market that oil traders are focused on and trading most actively. For oil to be delivered next month, which is when storage tanks could top out, the cost of a barrel stood at $10.01. A day earlier, it fell below zero for the first time, meaning traders paid others to take oil off their hand...
Read more

Mapping Extreme Poverty Around the World A new report from the

Image
A new report from the  World Bank  just landed, finding that a record low of 10% of humanity now live in extreme poverty, down from 11% in 2013. But poverty rates aren’t anywhere close to equal between continents or even countries, as our new series of maps clearly demonstrates. The World Bank provides an in-depth explanation for its methodology, which you can find in Appendix A of the full report  here . We focused on the percentage of people in each country living below what the World Bank defines as extreme poverty, or $1.90/day. We’ll let the researchers defend this definition on their own, but there is one caveat to keep in mind. It can be extraordinarily difficult to collect reliable data from so many countries on a regular basis, and in fact we used the latest year in which numbers were available whenever possible. For example, in some of these maps we compare 2011 figures against 2015. In short, our maps provide the clearest possible apples-to-apples compa...
Read more